Stratford Caldecott reflects on something that in this house is ready while I am still clinically dead — that is, before the alarm goes off:

I was introduced to great-tasting coffee a long time ago in Vermont, by a man who brewed it in test-tubes and fed it through an enormous filtering machine to make sure every molecule was just right. I know coffee is important in England too, but the differences are significant. The Scientific Revolution was partly founded on coffee, not tea. Both came from overseas, as valued imports traded across an evolving colonial landscape, but tea flourished in the intimate domestic setting of the upper classes, who could afford imported china to drink it from, whereas coffee was an urban and intellectual drink.

The first English coffee houses were opened in the seventeenth century in London and Oxford. By 1675 there were more than 3,000 of them around the country. Members of the Royal Society would sit around, vibrating with caffeine, and discover steam engines and gravity. Well, not quite like that—in the case of gravity it was more that a coffee-house conversation between Hooke, Halley, and Wren failed to solve the problem, and led them to send a letter to Isaac Newton, which got him working on the problem at home. But it has been said that the coffee-houses served a similar function to the internet today—a social network making possible the accelerated exchange of ideas (a network that the government of the time tried, and failed, to control). …

The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of the Yemen in southern Arabia. From Mocha, coffee spread to Egypt and North Africa, and by the sixteenth century, it had reached the rest of the Middle East, Persia, and Turkey. From the Middle East, coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe, and coffee plants were transported by the Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas. …

If we take coffee as a symbol for the mysticism of love, we might say that it is even more necessary than tea. A society that is not permeated by mysticism—which I take to be the inner dimension of religion—will inevitably fragment, and this begins with a schism between Left and Right, between the two types of practical atheism, of secular humanism; the collectivist and individualist types. Everything in such a society tends to be given a political interpretation. …

But is such a “mystical turn” in the cards? During the hippy movement of the 1960s it almost seemed so–at least to the hippies, who seemed to think sex, drugs, and music held the key to world peace and cosmic consciousness. Not any more. Most of the hippies have cut their hair and settled down. As for Christians in general, the robust statistics for churchgoing and religious activism render the need for mysticism invisible.

In any case genuine mysticism is not as superficial as it seemed in the 60s and 70s. It cannot be detached from particular religious traditions. Intoxication with the love of God cannot be imbibed through a pipe or ingested with mushrooms. It lies beyond the rational intellect (that part is true), but it isn’t anti-rational. The cultivation of the intuitive intellect is a precise science. Pope John Paul II promoted it most strongly in his encyclical on philosophy, Fides et Ratio. There he insisted that Catholic priests should be trained in a philosophy “of genuinely metaphysical range” (n. 83), a “philosophy of being” (n. 97). Mysticism is not metaphysics, but complements it. …

Look deep into your cup of coffee and see in its mysterious depths the fate of America. Ask yourself, is there a home here for mysticism or metaphysics, or only a culture war between mad men, rationalists whose philosophical assumptions confine them to a world of politics and economics, seeking material comfort rather than divine wisdom?